Director George Roy Hill and screenwriter Stephen Geller (TV’s "Mission: Impossible") adapt Kurt Vonnegut’s sardonic exploration of the timeless madness of human existence, from wartime atrocity to middle-class mediocrity to interplanetary euphoria. Middle-aged optometrist Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks) simultaneously exists in the past as a young POW in a German prison camp and in the far future as an elderly resident in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore (where he is memorably pampered by Valerie Perrine as the libidinous starlet Montana Wildhack).

Dustin Hoffman plays legendary stand-up comic Lenny Bruce in director Bob Fosse's ambitious biopic. Fosse, aided by gorgeous black-and-white camerawork by Bruce Surtees, provides an impressionistic portrait of a comedian as troubled as he was brilliant and controversial, with standout performances by Hoffman and Valerie Perrine as Lenny's wife, Honey Harlowe.